BOOK III. CHAPTER I. MONOPHYTISM. LEO THE GREAT had not lived to witness the last feeble agonies of the Western Empire; he escaped the ignominious feeling which must have depressed the spirit of a Roman, at the assumption of the strange title, the King of Italy, by a Barbarian: he was not called upon to render his allegiance, or to acknowledge the title of Odoacer. The immediate successor of Leo was Hilarius, by birth Nov. 19, 461. a Sardinian. As deacon, Hilarius had been the Hilarius. representative of Leo at the Council of Ephesus. His firmness during those stormy debates displays a character unlikely to depart from the lofty pretensions of his predecessor. He re-asserted in the East the unbending orthodoxy of Leo; in the West, he maintained, to the utmost extent, the authority which had been claimed over the churches of Gaul and Spain. Rusticus, Bishop of Narbonne, on his death-bed, nominated Hermes as successor to his see. This precedent of a bishop making his see, as it were, a subject of testamentary bequest, seemed dangerous, though in this case the lawful assent had been obtained from the clergy and the people. Hilarius, at the Nov. 3, 462. head of a synod in Rome, condemned the practice, but for the sentence of degradation substituted the lesser punishment, the deprivation of the right to confer ordination. In another dispute concerning the jurisdiction of the Metropolitans of Arles and Vienne over the Bishop Feb. 24, 464. of Die, the successor of St. Peter at least confirms, if he does not ground his whole ecclesiastical authority on the decrees of Christian Emperors. The Imperial sanction was wanting to ratify the edicts of the Apostolic See. The bishops of the province of Tarragona addressed Pope Hilarius in humbler language, and were treated, therefore, in a loftier tone of dictation. The only act of Hilarius which mingles him up with the temporal affairs of the age, is his solemn rebuke of the Emperor Anthemius, the sovereign who had been sent from Constantinople to rule the West, for presuming to introduce those maxims of toleration, to which his fatherin-law, Marcian, had compelled unruly Constantinople; and even to look with favour on the few surviving partisans of the ancient philosophy, if not of the ancient religion. Under the reign of Anthemius, the old heathen festival, the Lupercalia, was still celebrated in Rome. The venerable rite which still commemorated at once the genial influences of the opening year, and the birth of Rome from the she-wolf which nursed her twin Sept. 467. founders, was but slightly disguised to the worshipping Christians.b Western It was Simplicius, the successor of Hilarius, born at Tibur, who beheld the sceptre wrested from the Feb. 25, 469. helpless hand of Augustulus, and heard the Simplicius. demand of the allegiance of Italy from Odoacer, a barbarian of uncertain race. The Papal Epistles dwell only on the polemic controversies of the day, on questions Close of the of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, or ceremonial disci- Empire. pline: they rarely notice, even incidentally, the great changes in the civil society around them. We endeavour in vain to find any expression or intimation of the feelings excited in a Roman of the high station and influence of the Pope, at the total extinction of that sovereignty which had governed the world for centuries, and from which the Bishop of Rome acknowledged himself to hold to some extent his authority, by whose edicts Christianity had "Fratri enim nostro Leontio nihil constituti a sanctæ memoriæ decessore meo potuit abrogari, nihil voluit, quod honori ejus debetur, auferri; quia Christianorum quoque principum lege decretum est, ut quidquid ecclesiis earumque rectoribus, pro quiete omnium domini sacerdotum, atque ipsius observantiâ disciplinæ, in auferendis confusionibus apos tolicæ sedis antistes suo pronunciasset become the established religion of the world, to which the orthodox faith looked for its support, by the legal proscription of heretics; which had been at least the civil lawgiver of the Church, and by whose grants she held her vast increasing estates. How far was the conscious possession of a power, which might hereafter sway opinions as widely as the republic or the empire had enforced outward submission, and by force of arms had quelled every thought of resistance, accepted as a consolation for the departed name of sovereignty? How far did Roman pride take refuge under the pretensions of her Bishop to be the head of Christendom, from the degradation of a foreign and barbarian yoke? Christendom, from all her monuments and records, might seem to have formed a world of her own. Of the fall of Augustulus, of the rise of Odoacer, we hear not a word. Even in the midst of this extraordinary revolution, the active energy of the Popes seems concentered on the East. The Bishop of Rome is busy in Constantinople, opposing the intrigues of Timotheus Ailurus, the Bishop of Alexandria, and jealously watching the ambition of Acacius, the Bishop of Constantinople, a more formidable enemy than Odoacer, as threatening the religious supremacy of Rome. He takes deep interest in the changes on the throne of the East, congratulates the Emperor Zeno on his restoration, but it is because Zeno is an enemy to the Eutychian heretics, because he rises on the ruins of Basiliscus, the patron of the Monophysite faction. For while the West, partly from her want of interest in these questions, partly from the unsettled state of public affairs, from the breaking up of Attila's kingdom, the Vandal invasion of Italy, the Visigothic conquests in Gaul and Spain, and the final extinction of the empire, reposed, as to its religious belief, under the paternal sway of Pope Leo and his successors, the distracted East, in all its great capitals, was still agitated with strife, that strife perpetually breaking out into violence and bloodshed. The Council of Chalcedon had commanded, had defined the orthodox creed in vain. Simplicii Epist. p. 1078. Church in the East. с |